This deal unites the largest team of corporate Office engineers to deliver on Collabora Productivity’s mission to restore Digital Sovereignty to its users, while making Open Source Office Rock. It supercharges Collabora’s Online Office products and services portfolio with rich German language capability, deeper experience of vertical applications, new Web Assembly skills, and a wider unified partner ecosystem. Through improved product richness this sharpens the competitive edge of FLOSS Office productivity against mass-market proprietary alternatives.
CAMBRIDGE, UK – May 28th 12:00 CEST – 2025
Collabora Productivity, the world’s leading provider of collaborative Open Source Office editors have completed a merger with allotropia.
Collabora has invested heavily in building Collabora Online (COOL) – a market leading, on-premise, secure, interoperable, open-source solution for document editing and collaboration deployed to any modern browser. This is complemented by desktop and mobile apps across Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Chrome-OS. Collabora provides support subscriptions to enterprise customers worldwide via a network of hundreds of trusted partners. This is now augmented by allotropia’s partner and customer base. Together with our partners we deliver document and productivity excellence integrated with our partner’s product and service offerings.
We expect allotropia’s expertise around Web Assembly combined with Collabora Online to, in time, enable customer use-cases such as office-as-component embedding scenarios in vertical applications as well as off-line and end-to-end encrypted editing. This work builds on some visionary prototype funding from the Bundesministerium des Inneren (BMI) for a collaboration between the companies to enable the use of Collabora Online off-line in the browser.
Further details of product investment, and direction will be announced and decided in workshops with our key customers and partners at our annual COOL Days conference in Budapest next week where staff, community and our customer and partner-ecosystem meet, swap ideas, and hear about the latest work in our upcoming major release featuring improved performance, usability, interoperability and much more.
“Collabora is excited to welcome each member of the allotropia team today!” said Michael Meeks, CEO, Collabora Productivity, “We are excited to work together to accelerate our product development, enjoy our first COOL Days together, and plan the next features and possibilities to delight our customers”
Collabora has invested in building a network of hundreds of partners and is approaching one hundred million docker image downloads of its document editing server software, with millions of paying users of its products, all of whom will start to benefit from this merger from today.
We expect to bring the experience that allotropia has from its relationship with CIB around vertical desktop applications (Fachverfahren) to help partners and customers migrate their Windows & Microsoft Office based business process to easily deploy multi-platform web applications.
“With our awesome team of engineers, and our WebAssembly know how, we can add significantly to Collabora’s powerhouse of Office engineering prowess & their product offerings”, says Thorsten Behrens, CEO of allotropia, “we’ve worked with them as partners for many years, and align perfectly in our goals to make Open Source office rock!”
allotropia’s skills in supporting and contributing to the LibreOffice code-base in Germany strengthens and unifies popular shared partner products such CIB Office and Nextcloud Office. A larger team will accelerate development and improvement of Collabora Office based products, while providing an even deeper pool of support resources to rapidly respond to customers’ needs.
Together we want to pay tribute to the vast legacy of those who have worked so hard to preserve and improve the source code that we depend on from Sun Microsystems, Oracle, SUSE, RedHat, IBM, TDF, Canonical, and many more, as well as the innumerable volunteer community contributors who make the Collabora Online and LibreOffice ecosystem so rich and interesting: thank you for allowing us the privilege of working alongside you as we revolutionize the office productivity world together.
All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.
Supporting quotes
“With the importance of digital sovereignty increasing by the day, it is strategically crucial to join forces, build even stronger product teams, and achieve the critical mass needed to create competitive European software offerings. CIB is therefore looking forward to deepening our partnership with Collabora and providing more joint products and services around CIB’s intelligent process management solutions as well as our AI tools and language models, Collabora Online, and Collabora WASM Components” – says Uli Brandner, owner of CIB group
“This announcement enhances our confidence in the future of Nextcloud Office based on Collabora Online”, said Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud, “we love working with Collabora’s team, and are pleased to apply our expertise, customer feedback and incremental funding to develop features, improve user experience and overall contribute to building the next generation of open source office.”
“We are delighted that the openDesk supplier family continues to grow its capabilities.” says Alexander Smolianitski, of the German Government’s Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS), “Collabora is an essential component of our OSS suite. The merger with allotropia will further improve our access to valuable development resources—not least with regard to the integration of specialised public administration procedures.”
About Collabora Productivity
Collabora Productivity provides Collabora Online: an open-source solution for document editing and collaboration, complemented by desktop and mobile apps for seamless multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity provides support subscriptions via hundreds of trusted partners worldwide. Together they deliver document and productivity excellence integrated with our partners’ product and service offerings. With a strong focus on Open-Source, Digital Sovereignty and GDPR compliance, Collabora Productivity and partners deliver a secure, interoperable solution for deploying in organizations at scale.
Further information is available at: www.collaboraonline.com
Contact: Collabora Productivity Ltd
Michael Meeks, CEO, michael.meeks@collabora.com
Naomi Obbard, Marketing Lead: marketing@collaboraoffice.com
About CIB software
CIB (Computer Integrated Business, from 1989) based in Munich, is a technology and software development company specializing in digitalization, process automation, and artificial intelligence.
CIB develops AI-supported digitalization solutions for highly efficient and process-automated document management. Numerous users and administrations rely on our modular and integrable standard software solutions for automated business processes.
Our customers include financial institutions, insurance companies, public administrations, and international industrial companies. Business customers such as Atruvia, LHM, Volksbank, Generali, BMW, Allianz, Unicredit, and over 160,000 private customers rely on our software solutions.
Today, the CIB Group companies are represented at seven locations in Germany, Spain, Austria, and Portugal – CIB also originally spun off and therefore initiated allotropia, via a management buy-out offer to Thorsten Behrens while he was still working at CIB. Following careful consideration, Thorsten accepted the offer, and CIB participated with a minority stake of 25 percent, consistently waiving dividend payouts to support the venture’s growth.
About Nextcloud
Nextcloud is a world leading privacy-focused collaboration platform. It is used by tens of thousands of private and public organizations and tens of millions of private individuals to stay in control of their sensitive data and ensure privacy compliance.
With Nextcloud, users can edit and share documents, chat and hold videoconferences, and manage emails, contacts and calendars via easy web and mobile apps. The open-source software has a modular design and can be extended with hundreds of apps. It runs in on premises in a private cloud or with a trusted provider.
Founded in 2016, Nextcloud is fully employee-owned and has grown organically ever since. Learn more at www.nextcloud.com.
